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Covanta Energy began focusing on organic growth in 2011, undertaking hundreds of strategic initiatives to increase revenue. Most required the help of IT, and IT served as the driving force behind the success of many of them.

Vice president and CIO Stuart Kippelman helped create a global IT program to integrate, synchronize and then leverage multiple technologies and services to deliver these capabilities. The changes focused on automating the salesforce, delivering digital information to customers and using business intelligence to drive faster decisions.

One of Kippelman's biggest challenges was reshaping a corporate culture that resisted change. "We used to deal with a small subset of municipality customers. Now we've grown our salesforce and have pulled in hundreds to thousands of customers. You just can't scale the manual process."

Kippelman first won over employees with the launch of an automated contracts and proposals system in 2013. The system reduced the contract process from weeks to days. "This one project, because it has touched so many areas and is customer-facing, [has led to] a significant uptick in requests to get new systems in place," he says.

Ben Cabrera, senior director of business systems delivery, says Kippelman brings positive energy to the workplace. "His approachability, sense of humor, and the confidence he brings technically that 'we can do this' permeates through the team," says Cabrera.a